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Friday, September 22, 2017

Is it Time for Conservatives to Create an Alternate Culture?

The culture leans
sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means
conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs
at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for
example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below
it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics
in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The
left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid
whining, but they are very real indeed.

This was far from
the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings
on the Times’ all-important bestseller
list. Cortney
O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell:
The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author
couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er)
side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was
perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The
New York Times did have the book at No. 13 on its “Combined
Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved No. 4 slot among bestselling nonfiction
titles.

“It's not only an
insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said
“but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy
the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across
America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

A Times spokesman insisted that the “political views of authors have no
bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to
exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”

Ludicrous? The
Times says its list is based on “surveys”
of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential
context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently,
across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what
books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Confidential
context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously
unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the
sales figures themselves. The once highly-regarded “newspaper of record” is
notoriously leftist and D’Souza is a lightning rod for Progressive animosity,
so the idea that there might be some manipulation of the list is not only not ludicrous, it’s likely.

In response, Marji
Ross, president of D’Souza’s conservative publisher Regnery, said in a letter
to colleagues, “Increasingly, it appears that the Times has gathered book sale
data in a manner which prioritizes liberal themed books over conservative books
and authors.” Henceforth, she said, Regnery will ignore the NYT
bestseller list and abide by the Nielsen BookScan and Publishers Weekly lists instead. As Ross put
it in a letter to her authors, “We are often told it’s foolish to bite the
hand that feeds you. I say it’s just as foolish to feed the hand that bites
you.”

Good. It’s time for
writers, musicians, and other artists on the right to quit being slavishly dependent
on the left’s monopoly of media outlets and cultural institutions, and to launch
their own. As conservative novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan has
written, “The left uses its domination of the movie and book and art
industries to keep conservatives out… We need an infra-structure welcoming to
the arts.”

The left so dominates
the culture that the right is not so much waging a culture war anymore as it is a culture insurgency.
So right-leaning artists have two choices: one, continue swimming against the
tide to try to transform the culture from within while facing ostracism and
even blackballing; or two, consider resigning from someone else’s club and
starting our own. Either way is valid and both are valuable.

The upshot is, it’s
time for conservative artists to do more than complain about the culture bias;
it’s time for us to – first and foremost – create great art (or none of the
rest of it will matter), and secondly, create alternative distribution channels
to disseminate it: magazines, networks, publishers, production companies,
studios, awards shows, foundation grants, everything the left used to create
the current infrastructure that favors its worldview.

The technology for
this transformation is available. The funding is available (if only moneyed
conservatives had the vision to use it effectively). All that’s necessary is
the will.

About Me

Mark is the editor of TruthRevolt and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes about culture and politics for Acculturated, FrontPage Magazine, The Federalist, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He has made television appearances on CNN, Glenn Beck and elsewhere, as well as many radio and public appearances.
Mark has worked on numerous films including co-writing the award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.”
He is currently adapting a book for the big screen and writing one of his own for Templeton Press.